The introductory Apologia sets the scene: ‘These chapters are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done … The central character — the “I” of each chapter — is myself.’
My Nine Lives is subtitled ‘Chapters of a Possible Past’ and that is what we are given: variations on a theme of displacement, the search for love, and the often painful gaining of knowledge. The possible lives are turbulent, though the narrator, a trusting girl who gives more than she gets, is invariably passive, and willingly exploited. Wide-eyed, she moves through a world peopled by egotistical monsters, flighty, flirty mothers, gruff fathers who can be kindly, and lovers who bestow sexual favours before drifting on, either to oblivion or fame. There are divorces; an occasional ménage à trois or à quatre.
The parents in the stories are Jewish exiles from Nazi Europe, wealthy, or at least well off, the fathers concerned with security, the mothers reaching out for intellectual stimulus, fun or emotional fulfilment, openly disappointed in their less than beautiful offspring.
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